Win at Peebles takes Hawick eight points clear at top of Border League

​The top-flight table-toppers’ 38-7 victory away to Scottish National League Division 2 title hopefuls Peebles at the Gytes on Friday made it four wins out of four for the Greens in the regional competition.

That was their first stand-alone game of this season’s competition, being played as a league for the first time in years after scrapping its prior two-pool format, following three premiership double-header victories – by 61-7 at home at Mansfield Park to Kelso in September, by 61-0 away to Jed-Forest in October and by 36-8 hosting Selkirk later that same month.

Their four wins on the bounce leave the defending premiership champions eight points clear of second-placed Selkirk at the top of the seven-side league, with 16.

Selkirk and third-placed Kelso are both on eight points, the former from three fixtures and the latter from four.

That means head coach Matty Douglas’s team are still in contention for silverware on three fronts – along with the premiership title and Scottish cup both for the second year running – and he’s hoping they can pull off a winning hat-trick.

Their remaining fixtures are against Scottish National League Division 1 teams Melrose and Gala, the former at home on Saturday, March 23, with kick-off at 3pm, and the latter away on a date yet to be fixed.

The Pees are second from bottom of the table, without any points from two fixtures, and they’ve got four games to go – at home to Gala on Saturday, March 2, at 3pm; hosting Melrose on Friday, March 8, at 7.30pm; away to relegation-bound premiership basement side Jed-Forest on Saturday, March 23, at 3pm; and at fellow top-flight outfit Selkirk on a date to be scheduled.

Douglas is glad to be back in Border League action after not getting the chance to defend the Greens’ 2022 title last time round.

Friday’s victory was Hawick’s first stand-alone Border League fixture since their 18-14 win at home to Kelso in April 2022’s final as they didn’t make it out of their pool last year.

That time round, after drawing 20-20 at home to Selkirk, the Souters went on to beat Jed by a bigger margin than Hawick managed, 36-10 at home compared to the Greens’ 22-12 away, qualifying them for last March’s final against Melrose, so Douglas is pleased to be getting more of a crack of the whip, playing six games rather than two.

“The Border League’s another target of ours,” he said.

“We won it two years ago so we’ll be looking to try to win it back. We actually never lost a game last year but we didn’t get through because of points. That was the reason we didn’t manage to retain the Border League title.”

Peebles head coach Graeme Paterson was happy with the performance put in by his side against a team two divisions above them, saying: “We knew it was going to be a real test playing against the current Scottish champions and a club looking to back that up again this season.

“We knew that it was going to be physically very tough and that it’d present a lot of challenges for us, both in attack and defence, but I felt we gave a very good account of ourselves and it was really good preparation as well for our upcoming games in the league.”

Hawick’s tries at Peebles were scored by Kirk Ford, Gareth Welsh, Jae Linton, Eli Hamilton, Fin Douglas and Andrew Mitchell, with full-back Ford adding four conversions.

Peebles’ only contribution to the scoresheet was a first-half penalty try also earning a yellow card for visiting prop Ross Graham.